Dance Music Genres Safe as Fuck Watched Die in Real Time (Part 1)
- Crimmu$
- Mar 9
- 5 min read
In the interest of public education, Safe as Fuck has assembled a brief guide to several important dance music genres that shaped the modern festival landscape, primarily by proving that just because something is loud doesn’t mean it’s good.
Below are a few of the highlights.
Moombahton
Moombahton arrived in the early 2010s with the promise of merging reggaeton rhythms with Dutch house energy. The result was a genre that sounded like a laptop trying to play two unsynced YouTube tabs at the same time.
Many DJs embraced Moombahton because it offered something new.
Today the genre survives mostly in old festival folders labeled “2012 Bangers (Do Not Open).” And people that go to kits beach; yes, you will 100% hear it there for some reason.
Safe as Fuck would also like to recognize a historic moment in comedy logistics involving one of its founding members.
At the peak of Moombahton, sometime around 2012, said individual found himself in a basement in Kelowna listening to a young Semite passionately explain that Moombahton was
“The future of dance music.”
Rather than argue, he calmly set up a joke, planting the premise and waiting patiently.
4 years later, when the genre had quietly evaporated from polite conversation, he ran into the same guy again. Well, actually we brought him back to the warehouse we had lived above at the time from the UBCO campus
Without missing a beat, he delivered the punchline.
“Hey, so MooomBathon didn’t really take - off in the end did it!”
Witnesses confirm the room went silent for a moment before everyone realized they had just watched a Moombahton joke with a four-year setup.
Historians now consider it the longest successful Moombahton-related payoff in recorded history.
The young semite, embarrassed at his now ill - fated moombathon trajectory was shattered.
Tropical House
Tropical House was invented so people who hate house music could finally enjoy it.
Featuring gentle marimbas, ukulele sounds, and melodies designed to offend absolutely no one, Tropical House quickly became the soundtrack of beach bars, travel vlogs, and clothing stores that sell $90 linen shirts.
Critics have described the genre as:
“House music if it had to apologize before playing.”
The style is widely associated with Kygo, who proved that if you remove enough drums, bass, and personality from dance music, you can finally achieve the perfect sound for waiting in line at an airport smoothie bar.
Big Room House
Big Room House was created to solve a major problem in dance music:
What if subtlety was completely eliminated?
The formula was simple:
One build-up
One drop
One melody that sounds like a stadium horn being slowly strangled
Festival crowds loved Big Room because the music was designed to be understood from 300 meters away by someone holding a $21 beer.
Producers loved it because it allowed them to write a full track using three sounds and a rubber chicken.
Whatever Kygo Made
Technically this falls under Tropical House, but it deserves its own category because the industry spent nearly a decade pretending the difference mattered.
Music historians now classify the sound as “Rugrat Pop.”
Key characteristics include:
Pianos that sound like they’re apologizing
Drops that refuse to drop
Every track sounds like the intro from the Nickelodeon kids show “Rugrats”
Big with peedos
Tech House
Tech House is what happens when techno and house get together and decide neither of them should try very hard.
The genre is built on a revolutionary idea:
take a drum loop, add a bassline, and then refuse to introduce any new information for seven minutes.
Tech House DJs often describe the music as “groove-focused.”
Which is accurate.
Because once you remove melody, harmony, structure, and personality…
the groove is all that’s left.
Ghetto Funk
Ghetto Funk appeared during the same late-2000s internet moment that produced several other short-lived dance subgenres: a time when producers discovered that if you take an old funk record, add heavier drums, and repeat the phrase “get down” enough times, it technically counts as a remix.
The formula was simple:
vintage funk or soul sample
chunky breakbeat drums
a thick bassline
For a while the sound worked. It was energetic, accessible, and just retro enough to make DJs feel like they were digging into musical history instead of dragging a folder labeled “funk loops pack.”
The problem was that Ghetto Funk quickly revealed itself to be less of a genre and more of a production template.
Once the novelty wore off, listeners began to notice that most tracks followed roughly the same structure: a funk vocal from the 1970s repeatedly encouraging the audience to dance, layered over drums that sounded like they were trying very hard to convince the room this counted as innovation.
Clubs enjoyed it briefly because it felt familiar.
DJs enjoyed it because it was easy to drop between other genres.
And producers enjoyed it because it allowed them to claim they were making something “rootsy” while mostly rearranging someone else’s record.
Within a few years the style settled into a comfortable niche, where it continues to appear occasionally at festivals and themed parties—usually around the moment when someone in the crowd says:
“Wait… haven’t we heard this song already?”
FIDGET HOUSE
Fidget House was a short-lived dance music micro-genre that blew up roughly 2006–2010. It sat somewhere between electro house, UK bassline, Baltimore club, and blog-era remix culture. The name itself was half serious, half joke.
The music was built around hyperactive basslines and jumpy rhythms that felt like the track was constantly twitching or “fidgeting.” Hence the name.
Typical traits:
125–130 BPM
Wobbling or rubbery basslines
Heavy cut-up vocal samples
Glitchy edits and quick transitions
Tracks that felt like they might fall apart but somehow didn’t
It was very much bloghouse-era music—tracks circulating through MP3 blogs, DJs trading edits, and producers making chaotic club tools rather than polished songs.
The connection between Fidget House and Moombahton is actually a weird little moment in dance music history where one dying scene accidentally helped create another one.
Step 1: Bloghouse Chaos (mid-2000s)
Around 2006–2009, the blog era was in full swing. MP3 blogs were circulating edits and remixes faster than labels could keep up.
Artists like:
But by 2009–2010, that sound was running out of steam. Much like the ravers trying to dance to it without wanting to cry
Step 2: Dutch House + Reggaeton Accident
Then a DJ named Dave Nada played a party where the crowd was mostly into reggaeton.
He slowed down a track by Afrojack to around 108 BPM so it would mix with reggaeton.
That slowed-down Dutch house rhythm suddenly had a new groove.
That became Moombahton.
Step 3: The Same Internet Kids Adopt It
Here’s the funny part.
The same online DJ culture that had been circulating Fidget House edits immediately grabbed Moombahton.
Artists like:
started pushing it heavily.
So Moombahton ended up inheriting the same chaotic remix culture that Fidget House came from.
Step 4: Then the Festival Machine Arrived
Moombahton got polished, branded, and put on festival stages.
Just like Fidget House before it.
The actual historical pattern
Dance music historians eventually realized the cycle looks like this:
Weird underground genre appears online
DJs obsess over it for ~3 years
Festivals try to commercialize it
Fidget House → Moombahton was basically that cycle happening in fast-forward.
Final Thoughts
Despite everything written above, these genres remain fairly popular, proving once again that in dance music, confidence travels much farther than taste.
Here is a clip of Dillion Francis having a meltdown because a young girl spilled a drink; YES, that is a young SKREAM hugging Dillion and telling him to stop acting like such a bitch 🙂↕️
Safe as Fuck would like to thank the global festival circuit for continuing to give these sounds a platform, allowing the rest of us to experience the rare joy of hearing the exact same drop at six different stages simultaneously.
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